my island

bits and bobs

Hearing someone’s tinny music from their iPod earbuds. I don’t know how loud you have to have that crap turned up for me to hear it clearly several feet away, but I suggest either getting some better headphones or turning it down. Developing better taste in music would also help.

Screaming children. Not usually an issue, but every so often a tired-looking woman will get on with a buggy. Every so often the infant in it will screech, gurble, or wail and make me silently wish infertility on the entire human race. It’s especially sad when you watch someone interact with a child, and their resentment is so abundantly clear that you feel bad for the kid.

Smokers. Next time you want a fag while you’re waiting for the bus, consider whether or not the people on it are yearning for the bracing scent of cigarettes. I’ll help you out: they’re not. I know that years of heavy smoking have destroyed your olfactory senses, but trust me when I tell you that you smell so strongly like a giant ashtray that I have to change seats.

Chatterboxes. This one might not be fair, but at 8am, the last thing I’m in the mood for is overhearing other people’s inane conversations. This includes both mobile phone users and actual people chatting. Just hush and ride in despairing silence like the rest of us.

Films I Have Seen Recently

The Mechanic

The nice thing about Jason Statham films is that you know what you’re going to get. No silly symbolism, no pseudointellectual babble. Jason Statham will shoot people and beat them up and look cool while he does it.

In that respect, The Mechanic does not disappoint. Sure, there’s a cliched father/son storyline, but no one is going to make the mistake that this film is about anything more cerebral than kicking ass and blowing shit up. As a bonus, the relationship between Statham and his protegee is hilariously homoerotic.

Unknown

I feel bad for Liam Neeson. He’s a good actor, and he deserves better than some of the shit he’s been in. Taken, at least, had the quality of Jason Statham films aforementioned: you knew that this was not going to be an incisive look into the horrors of human trafficking. Liam Neeson was going to fuck things up and generally be a badass.

Not so with Unknown. The posters made it look like a Taken-style action film. What it actually was was an hour and a half of Neeson running around failing to mention basic issues like “I was missing for 4 days because I was in the hospital” and then a bit of fighting at the end. Rubbish. Needed less silly identity searching and more of Liam Neeson’s ‘specific set of skills.’

The Adjustment Bureau

This film starts out with the most improbable of premises: that a Senate candidate’s frat boy past would actually lose him an election. Not even a particularly egregious one either: he MOONED someone! Somehow we’re expected to believe that this would actually put a dent in a nice white boy’s election hopes, despite the fact that the last US President was a coke-snorting faux-redneck drunkard with delusions of grandeur.

The rest of the film is actually more plausible. Even the scifi bits. Even the bits where Matt Damon’s character leaves his love interest for three years and then another year, then shows up again to tell her that he really loves her, no really, he just can’t tell her about the men with special hats who can move through magic doorways and who are secretly controlling human history because we can’t be trusted to make decisions for ourselves.

Go look it up and see if I’m joking. Go on. Do it.

The Bourne films have spoiled me. I was expecting a serviceable thriller with a bit of action. What I got was a lame, halfassed romance mixed with a lame, halfassed scifi film, with a bit of lame, halfassed political critique added for extra eyerolls. It couldn’t do any of those things competently, and the ending felt unfinished, like the screenwriter got the characters to the top of that building and went, “… shit. Now what?” And basically just wrapped up there without any real resolution. The deus ex machina pops out, fixes everything, and that’s it. Two hours of my life I will never get back.